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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22569232">Stories of the Second Self: Under the Skin</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/John_Steiner/pseuds/John_Steiner'>John_Steiner</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Alter Idem [82]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Urban Fantasy - Fandom, school shooting - Fandom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 09:15:14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,662</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22569232</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/John_Steiner/pseuds/John_Steiner</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Falling asleep in math class, Mark awake from a dream of thunder to find that an explosion had gone off. Having been left behind, Mark realizes that it's part of a mass shooting and that he is in a position to stop it. However, doing so will require transforming into the wolf despite his werwolf foster parents' warnings against being discovered.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Alter Idem [82]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1618813</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Stories of the Second Self: Under the Skin</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was thunder he dreamed of. Mark often dreamed of thunder, whether he fell asleep night or day. This time, however, the reason was that a very real thunderous roar intruded into his sleep.</p><p>The last thing Mark remembered was in his algebra class when he'd drifted off. Last night was a long one for him, and so he couldn't fight his eyelids settling down and staying closed during a quiz. He woke after the room was devastated, and the entire wall with windows was demolished.</p><p>Everyone else in class was gone, when Mark woke with debris all over him. They must've assumed he was dead, and indeed he felt bruised all over, and he noticed traces of blood. Rising up onto his knees, Mark noticed minor scratches and scrapes from sharps of glass and fragments of wood.</p><p>"Hey," Mark called out and looked around.</p><p>He scratched around for his backpack, realizing the desk he had been in was mangled and clinging to him. With the wall gone, he could see the grounds outside and people racing away from the building. The rapid pops were what perked up his ears, and he realized something bad had happened.</p><p>He heard about the shooting at the city park, where Miranda was then chased by someone she said was trying to drink her blood. Whoever, didn't like human and supernatural kids hanging out there must've decided to hit Norwood High School itself.</p><p>Getting out of the twisted remains of his desk, Mark went for the door through which everyone else appeared to have fled. In the hall, most of the lights were off except emergency lighting. Mark's foster mother taught him to always know his exits, and he immediately remembered the route that Mr. Crane had led the class through during a fire drill.</p><p>However, cracking the fire door open, Mark saw that his class wasn't there and for good reason. He saw someone scanned the grounds with an AR-15, and gently let the door close. Whoever the guy was, he must have noticed, because Mark heard two discharges and corresponding pings off the door.</p><p>Trotting lightly away from the fire door, Mark carefully checked other classrooms and hallways before proceeding past them. Once, he saw a different guy with a gun checking every room he came to.</p><p>"Shit," Mark hissed under his breath with a snarl emerging.</p><p>"They gotta be outside by now," a voice called out, "Three people to sweep through the school for unnaturals, and the rest of us will spread out to get the rest trying to escape."</p><p>"Figures," Mark muttered, and peeked around the next corner.</p><p>Supernaturals were still hiding their existence, however the rumors spread and multiplied. Granted, Mark's parents had decided to take him on a nighttime romp in another Norwood park to further his understanding of his people.</p><p>"Wait," one of the gunmen said, "You hear that?"</p><p>Mark had been entirely motionless, so he knew they weren't hearing him. There was a sobbing that reached his ears, and Mark realized the gunmen were closer to the source than he was.</p><p>"It's the janitor's closet," another answered.</p><p>Listening to the gunmen's steps, Mark had a good idea when it would be safe to look around a corner at them. They came to the closet and opened it up. Huddled inside, was a girl Mark didn't know, and they pointed their rifles at her.</p><p>"No! Please," she pleaded with her hands up. "Don't shoot me, please!"</p><p>"She human?" one asked.</p><p>The other guy grabbed her hair and yanked her forward, getting screams and crying out of her, before replying, "Don't see no extra hair on her neck."</p><p>The first man waved his hands over her forehead. "No antlers either."</p><p>"Ehh," the second guy grunted, "She's human," and stabbed a finger at her, "You're lucky, kid. You're one of us. Where're the unnatural ones?"</p><p>"Unnatural?" she yelped, tears streaking her face, as she held the back of her head. "I don't know what you mean?"</p><p>"C'mon," the first guy shouted, "Don't be a race-traitor! The horned kids, and the ones that turn into monsters. You know which kids those are. Did you see where any of them went?"</p><p>"No," she cried, "I just ran in here when I heard shooting. I'm sorry!"</p><p>One readied his rifle and pointed at her. "Better not be lyin'!"</p><p>"I'm telling the truth!" she ducked down wrapping her arms around her head. "I am. I don't know! Don't kill me!"</p><p>"Shit," Mark silently mouthed, "Sorry mom and dad, but I gotta do this."</p><p>Mark carefully set his backpack down and started taking his shoes off. His knuckles went white from the strain of trying not to make noise. He didn't bother taking off his other clothes, because his parents taught him how to sew a hidden zipper seam into the seat of his jeans. Unlike the front, the back zipper didn't reach up to the belt loop, and there was no button or snap to undo that would open the jeans up.</p><p>The seam's only purpose was for his tail to come through when it started growing. Under Mark's pants, he wore black elastic sports shorts rather than underwear, which also had a special seam just at the base of his spine.</p><p>Struggling not to growl from the pain of bones cracking or skin and muscle stretching, Mark still fretted that the gunmen would hear him changing before he finished.</p><p>Fingernails retreated under his skin, and claws emerged in their stead. Mark's face stretched forward into a canine muzzle, while his ears reached up over his shifting head. Mark's body hair traded out for a full wolf mane and fur, and by that time the gunmen appeared to notice.</p><p>"Damn, that's one of them!" said a shooter now clopping Mark's way in heavy boots. "I'll get 'em!"</p><p>Mark, fully changed, backed away from the corner of the hall and into an abandoned biology classroom. He left the door opened a crack, because he wanted the shooter to follow him. Mark turned over the teacher's desk to face the door, but that's not where he himself hid. It was in one of the larger closets that had lab coats, where Mark stashed himself and waited.</p><p>"No, let's go in together," one of the gunmen said from outside the class door.</p><p>'Fuck,' Mark thought, 'Guess I'll learn what being shot feels like.'</p><p>The two shooters crept in, as Mark watched through the gap in the closet door. They immediately picked up on the impromptu barricade Mark had set up, and opened up on it with their bumper-stock equipped rifles.</p><p>With all the noise, neither of them heard Mark rush out. Before they could react, Mark had one man's head in his paw-like hand, and his other went for the throat as he turned the gunman's head sideways.</p><p>Having practiced on butcher shop pig carcasses, Mark's parents taught him how to effectively rip out carotid arteries. On a pig, and most other animals, the major artery went to their jaws, but on people the larger artery ran up to the brain, and after Mark's claws pushed through the skin he was able to hook them around the major artery by feel and yank on it hard.</p><p>From there, Mark shoved the first guy into the second, who panicked and pumped rounds into his pal. Mark dashed around and wrapped his right arm over the rifle barrel, while his left hooked up under near the pistol grip, as his mom drilled him.</p><p>In a swivel action, Mark pulled the buttstock of the rifle back, circled it up, and pushed forward, hoping to rack it or his elbow across the guy's face. The popping sound Mark knew, was the guy's wrist breaking during the maneuver, and his elbow connected against the man's temple.</p><p>The guy dropped into a heap, with Mark still cradling the gun, as he muttered in amazement with a lupine distorted voice, "Shhhit, it worrrked!"</p><p>With claws and thick pads on his fingers, Mark struggled with unloading the rifle, but once that was done he was able to shatter the plastic butt-stock against a lab counter, and then did likewise to the second rifle.</p><p>Hearing more footsteps pounding outside the class, Mark readied himself for trouble only to see two cops burst into the room. Their jaws just dropped as they stammered voicelessly at the sight of him. Mark backed up from them with his hands up, knowing they had him cold and could gun him down with ease.</p><p>To make sure they understood he wasn't resisting, Mark dropped down onto his knees. A task made hard with his feet longer than before, and his knees having a different range of motion. Mark also placed one paw-hand over the other on the back of his head. He couldn't lace his fingers too well. His fingertips were too thick and had webbing reaching up past the first joint of each finger except his thumbs.</p><p>"The fuck?" one cop gasped.</p><p>"I not rresisting," Mark grumbled, unable to complete an "m" sound with wolf lips. "T'hose guys arre z'he shhhooterz."</p><p>From his downcast gaze, Mark saw the two cops stared at each other in total bewilderment. Rather than arrest him or escort him out, they just kept Mark under gunpoint while calling for backup. More cops arrived, unable to believe what they too encountered. Mark dared not shift back, lest they misconstrue that and blow him away.</p><p>Photos of transformed Mark hit the TV, internet, and print news. Videos of him being walked out of the school surrounded by several cops with guns on him drew hundreds of millions of views on Youtube and Facebook on the first day. Being the first publicly confirmed werewolf, Mark discovered that his foster parents, also werewolves, weren't actually cross with him. Instead, they stood by him during interviews and reassured him with pats on his shoulder or hugs as he spoke to reporters.</p>
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